If you are forty or older, you may recall something called a “party line”. On a party line, users in a neighborhood shared one phone line. Whether the call was for you depended on the number of rings. Maybe your house was one long ring followed by two shorts. With party lines, as many as twenty people would share one phone line which seems crazy today. Party lines were also not very private as you could pick up the phone and listen to your neighbor’s conversation.Party lines however did have one unique feature, the General Call. In most communities, the general call was 5 long rings. This meant that everyone was to pick up their phone and listen while the operator addressed the entire community. This was how the community was alerted of fires, school closings, town meetings and more.
Needless to say, phone systems have certainly advanced in the past 50 years. Call waiting, caller I.D., teleconferencing, private lines, VOIP, and many more features have been introduced in the past couple of decades. Yet the biggest advance in the phone industry, the cell phone may lead to the death of traditional phones as we know them. Mobile Only Going Mainstream seems to be the trend today. A recent report from the Department of Health and Human Services states that homes with wireless only households have been rising steadily since 2005. In the first six months of 2007, one out of every eight adults lived in wireless only households. One year before, that number was one in 10.
It’s not uncommon today for every member of a family to have their own cell phone. Text messaging, ring tones, SMS, MMS, email, phone books, web capable phones, camera phones, Bluetooth and more are now standard on most phones. Yet ten years ago, none of these features were found. In fact, go back twenty years, and we had no cell phones.Just as we laugh at the thought of a party line today, will our grandchildren be laughing at the cell phone as something they couldn’t imagine having to use? What will they be holding forty years from now? It certainly won’t be what we have in our hands today.
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